Global Gridlock: How ‘aa Traffic’ Became the World’s Most Democratic Form of Suffering
Roads, Rivers, and the Great Global Parking Lot
By Our Man in Every Gridlock
Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the M25, humanity has perfected the art of not going anywhere. From Lagos’ Third Mainland Bridge—now a floating marketplace of street hawkers and pent-up testosterone—to the elegant immobility of Los Angeles’ 405 at sunset, the phenomenon politely labeled “aa traffic” has become our species’ most democratic ritual. Rich or poor, East or West, everyone eventually ends up staring at someone else’s bumper sticker and wondering how life came to this.
The term itself—aa traffic—originated, as most modern horrors do, in a software glitch. A mid-tier navigation app tried to abbreviate “automobile-associated traffic” and succeeded only in sounding like the first syllable of a primal scream. The label stuck, much like the vehicles it describes. Linguists predict it will soon replace “rush hour” in the same way “unprecedented” replaced “Tuesday.”
Zoom out and the numbers are almost poetic. Jakarta loses roughly $5 billion a year paying citizens to sit in mobile confessionals of carbon monoxide. São Paulo’s average commuter now spends 86 minutes a day achieving the approximate velocity of a sedated sloth. Meanwhile, tiny Luxembourg—population less than most American college football stadiums—imports 200,000 French and Belgian workers daily so that everyone can practice synchronized brake-tapping together. It’s the United Nations of idling engines, a communion of catalytic converters.
The geopolitics of congestion would make Clausewitz weep into his coffee thermos. Beijing weaponizes license-plate rationing like a fiscal policy: odd numbers today, even tomorrow, and if you’re foreign, good luck finding the rulebook. Delhi alternates between banning diesel and banning hope. London charges you the price of a decent bottle of Bordeaux just to enter the central zone—money that will allegedly fund greener buses, assuming any of them can outrun the Uber surge.
And yet, for all the grand plans, the smartest minds in Silicon Valley continue to invent ever more elaborate ways to park a 4,000-pound algorithm on the same strip of asphalt. Autonomous vehicles, we’re told, will talk to one another, coordinate intersections, and eliminate stop-and-go entirely. In beta tests they currently achieve the same average speed as a horse-drawn funeral—minus the dignity. One suspects the true endgame is simply a fleet of self-driving cars circling empty, patiently waiting for their owners to finish brunch.
Human nature, of course, adapts with ruthless creativity. In Nairobi, entrepreneurs sell everything from windshield wash to existential dread through a driver’s side window. Bangkok’s motorcycle taxis weave between lanes like caffeinated hornets, proving that Newtonian physics is negotiable if you’re sufficiently suicidal. And in Mexico City, entire families have turned gridlock into dinner theater, grilling carnitas on portable hibachis while streaming telenovelas off a hotspot named “¿Por qué no andas?”—roughly translated as “Why aren’t you walking?”
The environmental punchline writes itself. Global transport emissions now outstrip those of the entire European Union—an achievement worthy of a coal-rolling parade. Each additional minute of aa traffic is estimated to release 2.6 grams of CO₂ per vehicle. Multiply by a billion tailpipes and you’ve got a carbon footprint big enough to stomp a rainforest flat. But don’t worry, the next climate summit will surely address this right after the delegates finish arguing over which airport limo lane is theirs.
Still, there is something perversely comforting in the universal shrug we share when traffic apps predictably lie. It’s the last neutral zone in a polarized world: no one, not populist nor technocrat, can make the next light turn green. We are all equally late, equally frustrated, equally complicit in the slow-motion stampede we call progress.
So as the sun sets over a thousand glowing dashboards from Lagos to Los Angeles, remember: civilization isn’t collapsing. It’s just merging onto the on-ramp, indicator blinking for eternity. Buckle up, dear reader. The future is stationary, and we’ve got all the time in the world to get there.
